Limitless – the blog

To Mars and beyond.

There are no confines to man’s zest for life and adventure. Over the last 55 years since pioneer Yuri Gagarin leapt out of the bounds of the earth, 538 astronauts have been in space. 30 of them have spent at least one whole year (that’s right, 365 days or more!) of their life in the void. The record belongs to Sergei Krikalev for making a total of 803 days (2 years and over 2 months) in 6 spaceflights!

Gennady, Anton, Terry, Samantha, Mikhail and Scott. Heard of these names? Well, it’s unlike having to memorize 7 billion such. They are the handful of guys out in space right now, aboard the International Space Station on expedition 43. Inside their small pressurized cabin, the crew talk to their friends and family back home, tweet and even have their tools emailed from earth. But life in space is far from normal. While their raging nerve took these astronauts hundreds of miles into the sky, what pulls them through is their unrelenting quest to find a home like earth…somewhere across the one hell of a limitless expanse.

Can life be possible beyond the territories of the blue marble? What can make life flourish in zero gravity? Are there microbes in space that freshen up the air like they fertilize our soil on earth? What do we garner from the studies on mousetronauts, the tiny valorous lab mice in space? Watch this space for the answers to some of these questions.

This blog is inspired by the efforts of NASA and ESA, among others, to search for inhabitable planets and foster studies on the altered human physiology in space and effects of microgravity on human health. Here’s to many eons of human space exploration, nothing short of sheer limitless!